Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters


Corinne McKay

101 Things a Translator Needs to Know: published!

The translation business book genre has really exploded in recent years, fortunately for those of us in the trenches who need to know about these things. Newest on the scene is a little gold nugget of a book, 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know, written by a group of highly experienced translators known as WordLink. With members like Chris Durban, Ros Schwartz, Nick Rosenthal (many of whom have been translating since before I graduated from high school!), these are people you need to listen to.

101 Things has everything you need and nothing you don’t: each “thing” is about a hundred words, and the topics range from how to translate an idiom to how to turn lousy writing into a great translation, to how to create an ergonomic setup in your office. Each tip is accompanied by an illustration, making this book the perfect thing to grab when you need a little bit of wisdom to adjust your mindset or move your business forward. No bombastic pronouncements about what you must do if you want to claw your way to the top of this industry: expect wise, witty, well-grounded advice from translators who have walked the path that you’re walking.

Plus, it’s cute! Check it out, and then hop on over to Lulu and grab a copy for yourself (available on Amazon, etc. in 6-8 weeks).
101things


Corinne McKay

Bad habits that hold freelancers back

Let’s just dive in to this one: bad habits that may be putting the brakes on your freelance ambitions. Feel free to add your own in the comments! And for the record, I’m not getting all superior here…I culled many of these bad habits from my own experiences!

  • Waiting for the big block of time that is never coming. That book you’ve been planning to write; that marketing campaign you’ve been meaning to launch; that blog that you’ve been on the verge of creating…but not until you can take a week and focus only on that task. News flash: unless you’re independently wealthy and have no responsibilities to anyone except yourself, the big block of time is never coming. I tell you this because I waited (literally) two years to write the second edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, because I was going to take a month off and just blaze away at it. After two years of waiting for that elusive month, I decided that even if I only wrote one sentence, I had to work on the second edition every single day. And guess what; in another six months, it was done. So, whatever your long-term goals are, chip away at them in small, regular increments.
  • Publicly ranting about clients or colleagues. When I see people doing this, mostly in the form of Facebook or Twitter posts, I have one question for them: Why? I agree, everyone needs to vent now and again. But that’s what your e-mail and phone connections to your most trusted colleagues are for. Public ranting has so many downsides, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, nothing on social media is private, and someone may forward the rant to the client or colleague at whom it’s directed, even if you don’t actually name them in the post. Second, social media is there forever. You can delete the ranting post, but lots of people have already seen it. Third, it’s off-putting to other people who might refer work to you. I would never take the risk of referring a client to someone who is a habitual ranter. Also, I think that most clients run away from translators who have a reputation as being high-drama or difficult to work with. The emotional release of publicly flaming someone just isn’t worth the risk. Fourth: that whole thing about people in glass houses. I definitely get irritated when clients or colleagues inconvenience me because of their own bad planning, or send the wrong file, or don’t understand a question or instruction that seems simple to me. But I try to keep the perspective that undoubtedly, I do those same things sometimes, possibly without even realizing it. Fifth, it’s a waste of your time and energy. With the time you spend being aggravated at a client who bugs you, you could proactively go look for a new client who pays more and is less annoying. So, keep the complaints offline, and only to a few colleagues who you really, really trust.
  • Feeling that other people have all the luck in this industry. Everyone else lands the plum direct clients. Everyone else gets asked to speak at the cool conferences. Everyone else’s webinars sell out. My take: it’s not luck.  If you want to be jealous of something, be jealous that those “lucky” people work harder than you are willing to. As Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” So go out there and perspire; just don’t wait for the big block of time to do it!
  • Overestimating your marketing/networking/professional development efforts. I bet that if you asked most translators to honestly audit themselves, most people are doing *no* outbound marketing at all: zero. And even those of us who are doing outbound marketing are likely to be radically overestimating how much we’re doing. For example, I think I’m pretty good at outbound marketing, and I have a database of potential clients who I regularly send stuff too. But, I ordered a set of 100 marketing postcards about 10 months ago, and I have at least 40 of them left. I aim to send out one postcard per day, and I’m actually achieving more like one and a half per week. Ditto with professional development: let’s say that we recommended that freelancers spend the extravagant sum of 5% of their yearly gross income on professional development. So if you’re making 70K, that would be $3,500…here again, I’m guessing that even translators who attend something like the ATA conference are not hitting that mark. Result: if you don’t move forward, neither will your business, in terms of new clients and new opportunities (see “some people have all the luck” for more on this).

I could go on…but, over to you!


Corinne McKay

Beyond the Basics of Freelancing: starts May 14

I just wrapped up the “beta” session of my new online course Beyond the Basics of Freelancing and it went well; this class has been bumping around in my head for years and it felt good to finally launch it with a full session of ten great translators! We focused on various topics for the intermediate/advanced freelancer, such as writing different marketing materials for agencies and direct clients, identifying potential direct clients and ways to make contact with them, and how to set rates for various freelance services. Here’s some feedback from the participants:

Corinne is a blessing to all of us translators that have not reached terminal velocity yet. She is very knowledgeable about all aspects of a freelance translator’s challenges and has great passion for helping her students. Her books are great, but her online course is even better, because you take a feeling of “I can do this!” from it. I had a big increase in income the year after I took Corinne’s course and I attribute a large portion of that success to Corinne. I could not think of a better way to give your freelancing career a big boost than taking her course. Very inspirational, very valuable information, great program all-round!

Corinne’s course arrived just at the right moment in my freelance translation career, at this crossroads where you know you have to move up in terms of client base, rates and overall income, but you just don’t know where to start or how to do. Corinne has been a source of inspiration and motivation, as well as a role model, throughout the course and I will do my best to follow her advice – I want to be just as happy with my career as she is!

I feel very proud of being a follower of this “beta” session of Beyond the Basics course. The course was extremely well-structured, the topics were of great use to me and to my ongoing full-time freelance activity. Corinne is a passionate and skilled professional and teacher, she is always available and is a volcano of ideas and energies. This course helped me increasing my self-confidence and faith in what I do, it helped me out of the same ideas I sometimes indulge into and opened up a variety of options I would have never thought could be possible in translating and in marketing strategies. We are important as freelancers, as translators and as interpreters, we need to believe in this and to do our best to let the others understand that as well. I warmly advise everyone to follow the course.

The next session of the course starts on May 14 ($325; $50 discount for ATA members), so please hop on over to my business website to read a full description or to sign up.


Corinne McKay

You as a businessperson: in one word

Here’s a question, prompted by a fellow tenant of my co-working office. If you had to choose one word that you hope is used to describe you as a businessperson, what would it be? When he (the fellow tenant) originally asked me that question, I drew a bit of a blank. But then yesterday, after I (hopefully successfully…) mediated a very tense professional interaction, a colleague referred to me as “truly a class act.” And then my answer came to me: if I have to be only one thing as a businessperson, I want to be classy. I want to be the person who never, ever takes personal jabs at people and never, ever operates unethically or puts my own glorification ahead of the good of the project, or the industry, or the association.

I posed this question on Twitter and other translators chimed in, hoping that they would be thought of as “Professional” (Daniela Guanipa), “Resourceful” (Angel Dominguez), “Re-hireable” (Richard Lardi), “Transparent” (Mia Wilson), “Competent” (Filippe Vasconcellos), “Trustworthy” (Kevin Hendzel), and “Appealing” (Karen Tkaczyk). It’s an interesting exercise: over to you for the comments!


Corinne McKay

You need a freelance sanity routine

In my Beyond the Basics of Freelancing class, a student asked a really good question: how to stay sane while working on an insane project. No matter how carefully you manage your work flow and your routine, everyone has “one of those weeks” once in a while. A good client needs 15,000 words in a week, and you’re the only person they can trust it to…then the kid gets sick and the car breaks down and the dog has ear mites and the washing machine overflows.

Certainly, the best defense is a good offense: if I were to give one piece of advice to premium-market translators, it would be market in consistent, small increments, even when, or especially when, you have enough or too much work. Hopefully, that will smooth out some of the Everest-Death Valley cycle. But when you have one of those weeks, you need a freelance sanity routine: a few, small things that you do every single day, no matter how crazy the day is.

Here’s mine: I find that it makes me really nuts to be on the computer as soon as I wake up, or immediately before I go to bed. So, no matter how insane the day promises to be, I give myself some time in the morning to drink coffee (my one lifestyle vice) and have breakfast with my family. I never check e-mail or answer my work phone during that time, and this helps me get my day off to a relatively calm start. At the other end of the day, I’m often finishing up work or answering e-mail while my daughter does her homework after dinner. But I never let myself work until the second before I go to bed: otherwise I’m lying there awake, obsessing about some work-related thing. So my end-of-day sanity routine is that I try to log off all of my work stuff an hour before I want to go to bed. Then I practice my lute for half an hour and do a yoga podcast for half an hour, and no matter how insane the 15 hours between my morning coffee time and my evening music/yoga time were, I at least have that little oasis to look forward to.

The secret to a sanity routine is that you can compress it, but you never skip it completely. On a really bad day, like say yesterday, I might head to the office as soon as my daughter leaves for school, and the lute/yoga time might be 10 minutes of lute and 10 minutes of yoga instead of an hour total. But I really try to never, ever skip the sanity routine completely, or it really affects my happiness and productivity right away.

Other ideas for sanity routines?